What you are saying is that the confusion created by the sentence
of stating that my dad loves his kids and then my uncle loves his kids
- that nobody is sure in the final statement whose kids they are talking
about so they used EJUS.

blutoonwithcarrotandnail wrote:What you are saying is that the confusion created by the sentenceof stating that my dad loves his kids and then my uncle loves his kids- that nobody is sure in the final statement whose kids they are talkingabout so they used EJUS.

This makes sense if i am interpreting it correctly.

Thanks.

there is no confusion in the Latin, only in English. suus always refers back to the subject, eius is used only when you are not referring to the subject. it's not that they used eius to eliminate ambiguity, eius had to be used in that case otherwise the meaning of the sentence would change.

Pater liberos suos amat. -- can only be interpreted as "his own kids"

Pater liberos eius amat. -- can only be interpreted as "someone else's kids"

MarcusE wrote:This seems like such a useful distinction to be able to make that it makes me wonder why Spanish abandoned it. "Cicero le dio un regalo a su hija" could mean his daughter or somebody else's daughter.

Just a thought... as an empire and its language expand and you have more people speaking Latin as a second language in, say, Hispania, then these linguistic features that are more difficult for new speakers to acquire are the first to be neglected.

MarcusE wrote:This seems like such a useful distinction to be able to make that it makes me wonder why Spanish abandoned it. "Cicero le dio un regalo a su hija" could mean his daughter or somebody else's daughter.

Just a thought... as an empire and its language expand and you have more people speaking Latin as a second language in, say, Hispania, then these linguistic features that are more difficult for new speakers to acquire are the first to be neglected.

Benissimus is exactly right. When non-native speakers pick up a language in a natural setting (not a classroom) they usually simplify the language as much as possible and stamp out any irregularities... Spanish being a perfect example with it's loss of case endings, neuter gender, etc. The interesting thing is that the only irregularities that usually remain are in words and structures that are very high frequency such as the verb "to be" cp. English is, am, was, are.

This is certainly true in a general sense and well worth being reminded of and yet one of the really interesting things about language change is its degree of unpredictability - things get preserved that "should" have fallen away and vice versa.

Do any of the romance langauges preserve this distinction? If not then that suggests it probably ceased to be strictly observed fairly early on in vulgar latin. A topic for another place perhaps!

One thing to make note of is the fact that this distinction is more necessary in the written word. In actual spoken language the context is much more clear than when reading something written thousands of years ago by someone whom you know very little about and in circumstances you are not completely familiar with. The language was spread as a spoken form, not a written form... and this distinction probably wasn't very necessary in the everyday use of the language. In English we don't make this distinction except in rare cases where there might be ambiguity and we emphasize "his own" or if not referring to the subject we just omit the pronoun and restate the head noun "The father loves John's children" instead of "The father loves his children". This is probably what happened in Vulgar Latin.

I think that the more literate a language community is, the more stable the language is. We phrase things much more freely and even change the pronunciation of words in everyday speech ("John and Jim" becomes "John 'n' Jim") etc. In the written word, however, we are constantly brought back to the "pure" or "standard" form of the language and so we never venture too far into creating a new dialect.

I bet that even listening to educated Romans it was hard to distinguish amat from amant, aqua (nom.) from aqua (abl. long 'a') from aquam. They knew the distinctions were there, however, because they read and wrote the language regularly.

blutoonwithcarrotandnail wrote:SUUS is possibly ambiguous in its natural usage but EJUS is not.

Correct?

suus is not ambiguous. whatever word suus modifies (librum suum) is tied to the subject (whatever is in the nominative case)... always. eius, on the other hand, never references the subject. so they are opposites in a sense. only one can be used in any particular instance, there is no overlap. neither one is ambiguous. Again, I think the confusion is because you are translating the Latin into English where there is ambiguity.

Of course in many cases "reflection" is not always direct, either with reflexive (=personal in Latin), or with possessive pronouns. (direct reflection is called the situation of subject and object, or subject and possessor being the same person)

calvinist wrote:Benissimus is exactly right. When non-native speakers pick up a language in a natural setting (not a classroom) they usually simplify the language as much as possible and stamp out any irregularities... Spanish being a perfect example with it's loss of case endings, neuter gender, etc. The interesting thing is that the only irregularities that usually remain are in words and structures that are very high frequency such as the verb "to be" cp. English is, am, was, are.

Oh I cannot agree at all. First of all because, according to your reasoning, Italian (the closest to be called 'natives') wouldn't have lost the case endings and neuter gender, which it has (let me remind you that only Romanian has preserved -and partly- the declension and the neuter gender).

Apart from that, Baetica and other parts of the Empire (such as the coast of Tarraconensis) were rather well romanized regions so that we cannot consider these inhabitants to speak Latin as a second language (in fact, pre-Roman languages died out in few years because of the good Romanization). Latin was the first and only language to most population in Hispania as it was in Italia -- but, of course, it was Vulgar Latin in both of them, not Classical one. And we all know Vulgar Latin had lost a whole bunch of classical features from the beginning on.

calvinist wrote:Benissimus is exactly right. When non-native speakers pick up a language in a natural setting (not a classroom) they usually simplify the language as much as possible and stamp out any irregularities... Spanish being a perfect example with it's loss of case endings, neuter gender, etc. The interesting thing is that the only irregularities that usually remain are in words and structures that are very high frequency such as the verb "to be" cp. English is, am, was, are.

Oh I cannot agree at all. First of all because, according to your reasoning, Italian (the closest to be called 'natives') wouldn't have lost the case endings and neuter gender, which it has (let me remind you that only Romanian has preserved -and partly- the declension and the neuter gender).

Apart from that, Baetica and other parts of the Empire (such as the coast of Tarraconensis) were rather well romanized regions so that we cannot consider these inhabitants to speak Latin as a second language (in fact, pre-Roman languages died out in few years because of the good Romanization). Latin was the first and only language to most population in Hispania as it was in Italia -- but, of course, it was Vulgar Latin in both of them, not Classical one. And we all know Vulgar Latin had lost a whole bunch of classical features from the beginning on.

yes, they spoke Vulgar Latin as a first language which had already lost most of the elements of Classical Latin probably by being introduced as a second language, and I never said that was the only way languages were simplified, just one instance in which they are.. trust me I live in SoCal and I hear non-native English speakers making chop suey of English regularly.... but I don't want to argue man, just putting my two cents in.

Interestingly, Teresa Roguski asked a similar question, only this morning on 'Latinteach', after noticing the following sentences in the Rosetta Stone Latin course:

Here is what she noticed:

"
In a list of phrases and sentences from Rosetta Stone Latin I found some phrases that seemed wrong to me. I know you out there on the list can tell me what's correct. These phrases are captions for photos, not part of any larger context:

those are not complete sentences... there really is no subject/predicate so it may actually be fine in those circumstances. They're basically just labels, syntax is almost void in such a simple statement.